I setup our help desk users to be able to restore documents using Microsoft’s Volume Shadow Copy client on remote servers yesterday. Everything worked just fine for me as an administrator, and for users who owned the files, but it didn’t work for the help desk folks. I found out they didn’t have NTFS rights to the files and folders, so I assumed all I had to do was assign them change permissions, and they’d be able to do the restore.

I made the permission change, but when the help desk folks tried to view the contents of the shadow copy snapshots they received “Access Denied” errors. I had them confirm they could UNC to the location where the snapshots were located, and they could create and delete files there.

After much Googling didn’t provide many troubleshooting ideas, I decided to manually create a snapshot of the same volume. I had them test again, and they were able to view the snapshot’s contents and restore files. Underlying cause was the help desk group didn’t have permissions to the original snapshot, so they couldn’t see the files to restore them. Hope this helps someone else out.